45 Powerful Anaïs Nin Quotes on Love and Happiness

Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, simply known as Anaïs Nin, is a professional American novelist, writer, essayist, and diarist.

She inspired many people with her powerful writings. From her love letters and diaries to her pages of erotica, people can find comfort and inspiration in her words.

45 Powerful Anaïs Nin Quotes on Love and Happiness

1. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

2. “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

3. “I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as the reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

4. “I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.”

5. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”

6. “Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

7. “You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”

8. “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

9. “You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.”

10. “Do not seek the ‘because’ – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”

11. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”

12. “Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.”

13. “You cannot save people. You can only love them.”

14. “What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”

15. “Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.”

16. “What I cannot love, I overlook.”

17. “The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.”

18. “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.”

19. “In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.”

20. “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”

21. “For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.”

22. “When does real love begin?

At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.

At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?

At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.”

23. “Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.”

24. “I would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman’s life.”
Don’t wait for it,” I said. “Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.”

25. “The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.”

26. “If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.”

27. “My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.”

28. “I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.”

29. “I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain.”

30. “And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way, I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same.

We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.”

31. “Things I forgot to tell you:

That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you.

That when June comes back she will love you more because I have loved you. There are new leaves on the tip and climax of your already overrich head.

That I love you.
That I love you.
That I love you.

I have become an idiot like Gertrude Stein. That’s what love does to intelligent women. They cannot write letters anymore.”

32. “I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”

33. “I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.”

34. “Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

35. “I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.”

36. “I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.”

37. “We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.”

38. “There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.”

39. “It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.”

40. “You haven’t loved yet,” he said. “You’ve only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.”

41. “Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.”

42. “He had not touched me. He did not need to. His presence had affected me in such a way that I felt as if he had caressed me for a long time.”

43. “The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.”

44. “…For love it is never the same. What goes on inside is never the same just like this music which changes every instant. For love, there are a million variations, a million nights, a million days, contrasts in moods, in textures, whims, a million gestures colored by emotion, by sorrow, joy, fear, courage, triumph, by revelations which deepen the groove, creations which expand its dimensions, sharpen its penetrations.

Love is vast enough to include a phrase read in a book, the shape of a neck seen and desired in a crowd, a face loved and desired, seen in the window of a passing subway, vast enough to include a past love, a future love, a film, a voyage, a scene in a dream, a hallucination, a vision. Love-making under a tent, or under a tree, with or without a cover, under a shower, in darkness or in light, in heat or cold.”

45. “I dreamed you, I wished for your existence.”

Conclusion

The truth is life sucks sometimes. Too many struggles, heartbreaks, disappointments and pains come our way.

But not every day is rainy, we can always find love and happiness in simple things.

About PONBEE

Ponbee.com strives to provide motivational and inspirational sources to all those who want to taste success in the different spheres of their lives. This website can serve as the perfect resource to enable self-improvement and the will to succeed among readers.